1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the technology of laying out contents including text and images.
2. Description of the Related Art
When contents including, for example, text and images in a document are laid out in a certain area, the following operations have been carried out (refer to, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,224,181). For example, a composition application has been used to determine the locations of placement of individual contents by manual operations carried out by a human being. Alternatively, a template which can be used to output the contents in a fixed layout format has been manually prepared in order to lay out the contents.
Technologies for determining the merits and demerits of a method of laying out contents relying on human intuition or manual operation are also available (refer to, for example, US Patent Laid-Open No. 2003/0086619).
However, when the contents in a document are laid out manually without any layout information which specifies how the contents in the document are to be laid out, the workload due to trial and error is increased, thereby causing human resources costs to become extremely high.
Even when a template which can be used to output contents data in a fixed layout format is prepared and used to lay out and output an image or a text, the image or text can only be output in certain types of fixed patterns. Therefore, a layout result in accordance with, for example, the types and sizes of various contents data that are input cannot be flexibly obtained.